Harold Roberts considers himself to be one of England's last true Englishmen. Now 74, he has been farming in the heart of land straddled by the Cotswolds and the Bredon and Malvern hills since he was eight years old.

'I farm from 6.30 every morning to until it is too dark to see, every single day,' he says. 'Every slice of meat or vegetable on my dinner plate has been farmed by me.'

He used to own 60 acres in Worcestershire, the heart of England, but now has only eight: his son has no interest in taking over the land and Roberts has kept just enough to feed himself and his wife, Joan. 'My hobby now is attending the sale of local farms,' he says sadly, breaking off from haymaking. 'I went to one today. I don't go to buy anything, just to talk to the friends who are being forced to sell up. One by one, we're falling by the wayside. Soon there will be none of us left.

'I don't understand how anyone can feel English when they don't have a connection with the English soil. The soil is my identity: it is as important to me as contact with living people,' he adds, threading twine between thick, calloused fingers. 'It is who I am, where I come from and, in the end, where I will go.'

Not everyone has such a keen sense of their identity. A recent Mori poll showed the English are deeply confused about whether to define themselves as English or British, or whether their first line of allegiance should be to their geographical region or even their immediate local community.

The question of what it means to be English has been asked with increasing frequency and intensity in recent years, with a flurry of books and television programmes debating whether the English have lost their national identity and whether there is any longer such a thing as 'Englishness'.

But the debate has sharpened with the convergence of Euro 2004, the European elections and the anniversary of D-Day leading to a dramatic growth in the symbolic display and talk of Englishness.

According to one report, 30 million flags of St George have been sold in the run-up to today's game against France in Portugal to be set fluttering from every shade and model of car, driven by English men and women of every age, religion, culture and class.

In one corner of a Worcestershire field, Charles Hudson has taken the flying of the flag even further by planting a two-and-a-half acre carpet of delphiniums in the image of the St George's cross. 'It is not remotely nationalistic,' he laughs. 'It is pure English eccentricity with a bit of publicity nous thrown in.' Hudson, who set up the Real Flower Petal Confetti Company five years ago, aims to enter the Guinness Book of Record for the biggest carpet of flowers in the world.

When the red and white flowers blossom this week, Hudson will employ up to 200 local people to pick them: 'I pay per pint of petals. Some people make £14 an hour while others come to simply spend a day in a field of flowers and bring a picnic. I can't image anything more English than that.'

Aside from this one brief flowering of national pride, however, there remains a deep confusion about what it actually means to be English.

A few miles from Roberts's dwindling acres of farmland, 60-year-old Gary Andrews proudly points out the extra land his asparagus crops will soon cover.

'The Vale of Evesham is the home of English asparagus and my family has been in this trade for as many generations as I can remember,' he says. 'It is in my blood and the blood of this area.'

Ten years ago his business was so bad that he steeled himself to closing up shop. In the past four years, however, he has expanded his farm from 12 to 30 acres.

'There has been an increase in demand from the supermarkets for English produce, which we have been able to meet by exchanging our native breed of asparagus for a more hardy species from the Netherlands.

'But the biggest help has been this new population of immigrants, who will do the harvesting that local people will not do for love nor money. I feel like our Englishness has survived to fight another day.'

Andrews, however, voted for the UK Independence party in last Thursday's elections. 'I see how it might sound odd,' he says, unashamed. 'I know I need foreign help to keep farming and the Ukip will put an end to those workers coming here, but Englishness is a delicate tree and I think, if we need to pollard a few branches to protect the rest, it is worth it.'

Such preparedness to sacrifice national culture in the name of supposed patriotism is proof of the scale of the identity crisis facing England, says Paul Gilroy, London-born professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Yale University and author of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack and The Black Atlantic: Modernity & Double-Consciousness.

'There is an anxiety about what it means to be English today that has reached a level of urgent intensity in the past five years,' he says. 'We are returning to a nativist interpretation of what England is, which can only lead to misery - both for incomers being bullied into adopting a version of Englishness, and for those born here, who are destined to be bitterly disappointed by eternally unmet, unrealistic expectations.'

Anxiety over what it means to be English is not a new phenomenon: Daniel Defoe's 1701 anti-Tory satire, The True-Born Englishman, celebrated the qualities of a 'mongrel' nation while revealing a deep-seated fear seething among his countrymen that their Englishness was being diluted and corrupted.

But after more then 300 years of asking the same question, many are now beginning to voice their suspicions that, bar the white cliffs and the bad weather, nothing is forever England and, however old the quest for the essence of Englishness, the hunt is a bogus one, born of insecurity and delusion.

'Any coherent definition of Englishness was swept into a wider sense of Britishness with the union with Scotland,' says Linda Colley, author of Captives: Britain, Empire and the World 1600-1850.

'Englishness is a new concept: a word that has only recently been invented. For any people to try to pin down their identity as though it is a captive butterfly is simply wrong: people are able to have more than one identity and the fact we're returning to trying to limit ourselves to one identity is a sign of a growing insecurity and uncertainty.'

Colley believes that the recent search for Englishness is the reaction of a nation feeling squeezed out of existence by Europe on the one side, and by the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland on the other.

The rebirth of core cities such as Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield has, she believes, kindled feelings of regional identity but done little for a nationwide sense of Englishness except create a new atmosphere of intolerance.

It is a view powerfully rebutted by Sir Bernard Crick, author of George Orwell: A Life and a book of political essays, Crossing Borders, who was commissioned by the government to devise citizenship lessons for immigrants. 'There is nothing to be ashamed of in trying to establish what it means to be English, any more than there is something to be ashamed of by defining what it is to be Scottish or Welsh,' he says.

'Englishness is something to be proud of and protected. A determination to discover what Englishness is, is a sign we are ready to become stronger as a nation. It was when we did not dare ask the question that we were weak.'

But the search for Englishness carries a more distinctive problem than the search for Scottishness or Welshness.

'The England team is the only team playing in the world cup that is not a nation state: there is no political or cultural outlet for England's feeling of national identity,' says Mark Perryman, head of the LondonEnglishFans group.

'We don't know who we are: we're not British, we're not Scottish or Welsh. We're partly the powerful nation of yore and partly dispossessed. It's an extraordinary position to be in.'

This dispossession is why Professor Roger Scruton, philosopher and author, believes the English are facing one of the most dangerous moments in their history.

'If people don't have a social and an individual identity, they have no way of identifying with their neighbours or anyone else. That way lies social chaos, which is a potentially violent place to be.'

Sunder Katwala, general secretary of the Fabian Society, believes part of the problem is that, while Britishness has been defined and redefined over the generations, Englishness has remained untouched. 'We knew what Britishness was, so it could be adopted, adapted and pluralised,' he says. 'This is why we have British Asians but not English Asians.

'But far from being weakened by the lack of definition, the fact that we can't define Englishness means we can still create it depending on what we want it to be. That very nebulousness has enabled the English to absorb new cultures and influences with fluid ease.'

Today in Portugal, Mark Perryman is doing his best to create his own definition of Englishness by handing out postcards to local people of the St George's flag with words 'Friendly Fans' translated into Portuguese written across it. 'We want to reclaim the flag and the associations of Englishness; make them into symbols and bywords for friendliness,' he says.

Such an act is, according to Julian Baggini, editor of the Philosophers' Magazine, a sign that the English might finally be ready to stand on their own: 'The craving for certainty in any part of life is childish and misguided. We have to get over that need if we are to mature as an English nation, comfortable with its own uncertainty and ambiguity'

Handing out postcards in Portugal, Perryman believes the English are in a position of unique power and opportunity. 'There is a great deal of clear space on the flag of St George. It's all bare for us to write our identity on it as we stand today and wish to stand in the future.'

While Perryman's postcards might not help us pin down the fluttering butterfly of what 'Englishness' is, they might instead provide new and persuasive answers to a more interesting and useful question: 'What is England for?'